Brazilian Labour History
New Perspectives in Global Context

Contributions to this volume examine Brazilian labour history, contextualising their research in the field of global labour history.

Paulo Fontes (Edited by), Alexandre Fortes (Edited by), David Mayer (Edited by)

9781108450898, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 August 2019

270 pages
23 x 15.4 x 1 cm, 0.38 kg

This volume examines Brazilian labour history, integrating issues of gender, race, and ethnicity by addressing topics such as free and unfree labour in the nineteenth-century Amazon, the transnational contexts of urban sex work, the intersection of 'class' and 'community' in a São Paulo workers' bairro, and the (legal) struggles of sugar cane workers in Pernambuco. At the same time, this volume presents a renewed historiography of movements and organisations (often with an emphasis on transnational dimensions), covering issues from revolutionary syndicalism in Rio, through the role of World War II in the formation of Brazilian populism, to the intervention of US 'free unionism' during the military dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina. This volume goes beyond a survey of more recent Brazilian labour history and offers articles that enter into conscious dialogue with the debates and findings of scholarship in other world regions.

Brazilian labour history in global context: some introductory notes Paulo Fontes, Alexandre Fortes and David Mayer
1. Free and unfree labour in the nineteenth-century Brazilian Amazon Adalberto Paz
2. Maids, clerks, and the shifting landscape of labour relations in Rio de Janeiro, 1830s–1880s Henrique Espada Lima and Fabiane Popinigis
3. Revolutionary syndicalism and reformism in Rio de Janeiro's labour movement (1906–1920) Claudio Batalha
4. Between Rio's red-light district and the league of nations: immigrants and sex work in 1920s Rio de Janeiro Cristiana Schettini
5. From the streets to the government: socialist militants and labour law in Brazil Aldrin A. S. Castellucci and Benito B. Schmidt
6. World War II and Brazilian workers: populism at the intersections between national and global histories Alexandre Fortes
7. The local and the global: neighbourhoods, workers and associations in São Paulo (1945–1964) Paulo Fontes
8. Sugarcane workers in search of justice: rural labour through the lens of the state Christine Rufino Dabat and Thomas D. Rogers
9. Looking at the southern cone: American trade unionism in the Cold War military dictatorships of Brazil and Argentina Larissa Rosa Corrêa.

Subject Areas: Industrialisation & industrial history [HBTK], History of the Americas [HBJK], Regional & national history [HBJ]